When the time to leave for the West arrived I felt like an old stager, and indulged for the first time in the delight of getting out my hunting outfit, deciding what I needed, and supplementing my last summer’s rig with other things that I had found would be useful. Like all beginners I imagined that I required a lot for which I had in reality no possible use. Some men always set off festooned like Christmas-trees, and lose half the pleasure of the trip through trying to keep track of their belongings. They have special candles, patented lanterns, enormous jack-knives with a blade to fulfil every conceivable purpose, rifles and revolvers and shotguns galore; almost anything that comes under the classification of “it might come in handy.” The more affluent hunter varies only in the quality and not the quantity of his “gadjets.” He usually has each one neatly tucked away in a pigskin case. The wise man, however, soon learns that although anything may “come in handy” once on a trip, you could even on that occasion either get along without it or find a substitute that would do almost as well. It is surprising with what a very little one can make out perfectly comfortably. This was a lesson which I very quickly learned from the Captain.
The second trip that we took was from Deadwood, South Dakota, to Medora, North Dakota. I had never seen the country in which father ranched, and Seth Bullock decided to take me up along the trail that father had been travelling when they met for the first time.
We set off on Friday the 13th, and naturally everything that happened was charged up to that inauspicious day. We lost all our horses the first night, and only succeeded in retrieving a part of them. Thereafter it started in raining, and the gumbo mud became all but impassable for the “chuck-wagon.” The mosquitoes added to our misery, and I find in my diary in the Captain’s handwriting a note to the effect that “Paul shot three mosquitoes with a six-shooter. Stanley missed with a shotgun.”
The Captain was as stolid and unconcerned as a Red Indian through every change of weather. He had nicknamed me “Kim” from Kipling’s tale, and after me he had named a large black horse which he always rode. It was an excellent animal with a very rapid walk which proved the bane of my existence. My pony, “Pickpocket,” had no pace that corresponded, and to adapt himself was forced to travel at a most infernal jiggle that was not only exceedingly wearing but shook me round so that the rain permeated in all sorts of crevices which might reasonably have been expected to prove water-tight. With the pride of a boy on his second trip, I could not bring myself to own up to my discomfort. If I had, the Captain would have instantly changed his pace; but it seemed a soft and un-Western admission to make, so I suffered in external silence, while inwardly heaping every insult I could think of upon the Captain’s mount. We were travelling long distances, so the gait was rarely changed unless I made some excuse to loiter behind, and then walked my pony in slow and solitary comfort until the Captain was almost out of sight, and it was time to press into a lope which comfortably and far too rapidly once more put me even with him.